After a trip to the coffee spot by the Green the other week, I turned left and left on a random street, then writer back in chair. 

Cup smoldering on desk, taste still bitter but beautiful and seductive nudge.  Don’t want to be stuck in thought so I won’t let SELF stop typing, who gives a shit if it makes sense.  And what is sense? And how do you “make” it?

Here I am.  Trying to elevate my productivity color, push it from ash to Cancun beach sky.  Brighter, capturing, alive.  Like the day I went for that run looking for crocodiles and didn’t find any, met up with the Nurse and her daughters friend on the beach while they were in yoga class.

Then I wrap self in family—how they’d laugh at some scenes, or how I see them, journal them…

 Me, pacing the street like I’m chasing some rare wisdom, only to come back with a latte for me and the Nurse’s younger daughter, same restless thoughts. 

My fiancée would remind me that sitting down itself is the victory.  My stepdaughter might roll her eyes, or at least that’s what I’m writing now just fiddling with the fictive, and ask why I don’t just drink tea.  Good point, should probably sip more tea than overly-electric espresso…

Small reminders serve as ballast.  Quiet lessons when I’m trapped in my head.

Life moving around me, steady and generous, instructive. 

If Oliver were here he’d want his morning walk.  I write about that, in circles that teach me, give him more character and Beat.

The neighbor, never home.  I leave, walk to the mailbox. 

The Nurse—my Nurse, my compass—still manages to balance her whole universe while I wrestle with mine.

Gratitude sneaks in sideways like that. Not the fireworks kind, not the Instagram mantra, but the kind that says: you’re alive, you’re here, you’re loved, and you’re allowed to try again today.

And that’s the evasive thesis of Mindfulness, really.  Not floating away on some cloud of Zen, but letting the absurd, the ordinary, and the sacred coexist. 

The latte, chair, family stories and scattered but somehow-connected vignettes, the stubborn effort to write—it all compiles. It all builds.  New Architecture.  For ME—

So I stay. In the chair. In the morning. In my life.